


hello, bright eyes (been waiting on you)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Interstitial, Past SasuSaku, ft. both Sakura and Sai's separate issues with being part of Team 7, low boiling angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 08:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17679596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: “look underneath the underneath,” except no one has ever really bothered to look at sakura and see her. and then there is a boy (isn’t there always). maybe they’re both just ghosts, making each other real.





	hello, bright eyes (been waiting on you)

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr, for safe-keeping.

**xv.**

 

“You will never replace Sasuke,” Sakura spits at him. “You’re nothing. You mean _nothing_. Do you understand?”

At the very least, her forearm collapsing his trachea has wiped that empty meaningless smile off his face.

Sai watches her carefully, something curious and dark uncurling in his eyes.

“I understand,” he rasps out, or tries to.

Sakura holds him against the wall for another long moment. He keeps his hands placid at his sides, not fighting her.

Not that he would win, not when she has him so neatly pinned, chakra thrumming under her skin.

But he doesn’t even try.

Sakura just can’t decide if it’s because he doesn’t think she’ll dare try anything more or if it’s because Sai knows that it would be useless.

No one else, she thinks, would believe that she’d lean in a little further, apply just a little bit more force.

But something curious and dark is uncurling in Sai’s eyes, and she thinks that, maybe, this boy who understands nothing might just—

Sakura lets him go.

Sai falls to his knees, gasping, bruises already blooming on the soft skin of his throat.

Sai doesn’t ever attempt another joke about his place on the team but he doesn’t stop watching her either.

He isn’t subtle, but Naruto doesn’t seem to notice.

Sakura shakes her head and lets that gaze roll off her.

She’s just Haruno Sakura, the least of Team 7. There’s nothing to see here, don’t you know?

 

 

 

**xiv.**

 

“Sakura,” Tsunade-shishō sighs.

The fourteen year old looks up from the scroll that she’s studying. “Shishō?” Sakura doesn’t know what to make of the weariness carved into the corners of her teacher’s mouth.

“Haruno Sakura, shinobi of Konohagakure” Senju Tsunade, granddaughter of the old gods, Godaime Hokage, says, “there is something I must ask of you.”

 

 

 

**vii.**

 

“—sprang from the darkness, like lightning on a summer day, and plunged the blade right into the Daimyo’s neck!”

Sakura gasps and hides further in her cocoon of blankets. “But Otō-san, why didn’t the Daimyo’s guards see her coming?”

Kizashi sweeps a loose curl of hair to the side so that he can better look into those wide impossible eyes. “That’s what shinobi do, Little Flower; we go unseen.”

 

 

 

**xii.**

 

“And you, Sakura,” Kakashi-sensei turns to her once Naruto is, finally, finished with his report, “did you get what we needed?”

Sakura smiles and twirls the keys around her index finger.

Kakashi-sensei smiles back, a creased-eye thing, and Sakura swallows down the bubble of joy at a job well done.

“If you have a pen, sensei, I’ll draw out a map of the complex.”

Naruto congratulates her loudly and Sasuke-kun hums something that might be an agreement (and he only rolls his eyes at Naruto’s most inventive compliments, not the general idea of praise for her, for Sakura).

Kakashi-sensei doesn’t even bother asking her if she’s sure she went unnoticed. He knows that she did.

When the mission is a success and they’re safely home and the boys are squabbling over who did the most important fighting, Sakura happily nurses her black eye knowing that it’s her information that got them through.

 

 

 

**v.**

 

“Sakura,” says Kā-chan, “what are you doing?”

Sakura freezes, hand most of the way in the cookie jar. Slowly, she turns her head. “Nothing?”

Kā-chan just leans further into the doorframe and raises a single eyebrow. “Is that so?”

Sakura sucks on the inside of her cheek. “Practicing stealth?” she tries again.

Kā-chan raises her other eyebrow. “Mhmm. I see. I think you’re in need of more practice yet if you’re to start stealing cookies to ruin your appetite.”

Guiltily, Sakura extracts her hand from the jar, gently returning the lid and dropping down off of the counter.

“Come on, then, we better get to practicing.”

Sakura’s head whips up from where she’s been staring at the floor in remorse.

Kā-chan is holding out her hand, a wicked smile on her lips. “I’ll show you how to walk on our creaky floorboards without making a sound. If you get good, you’ll be able to sneak up on your father when he’s reading the newspaper.”

 

 

 

**xvi.**

 

“You could have chosen anyone,” Sakura says. The night is cold and the stars are bleak. “Why me?”

Sai doesn’t look up from his pad of paper, pen sketching broad lines in the soft flicker of the campfire keeping them warm.

“Because your smiles are empty too, sometimes. And I wanted to learn what makes the difference.”

Sakura startles, kunai nearly slipping from where she’s been spinning it lazily on her fingertips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dark eyes pierce through the night, striking her hard somewhere right below her ribcage.

“Like that,” Sai says, pointing to her face with the end of his pen. “I want to know how you can smile empty without anyone else noticing.”

 

 

 

**xv.**

 

When Shimura Danzō oozes into Tsunade-shishō’s office, false platitudes on his lips for the ANBU team lost on a mission and, oh, but can he provide her with soldiers who will get the job done without such unfortunate… failure? his gaze skips right over her.

Sakura curls herself smaller, dips her head down so that her hair covers her face, and allows herself a small smile.

 

 

 

**xvi.**

 

Sai sidesteps her lunge and Sakura rolls, narrowly avoiding the ink lion that tries to intercept her.

“ROOT, huh? Never heard of it,” Sakura lies. “What was that like?”

A series of hand signals and an earthen wall slams up in front of her, stopping a barrage of kunai. She leaves a clone there and drops underground.

“Unlike the Academy,” Sai answers as he tries to throw her over his shoulder, but Sakura uses the momentum to swing herself around him, thighs wrapped around his neck.

“How so?”

An ink eagle gets her by the back of her shirt and pulls.

A quick application of chakra, and Sakura lands softly in a crouch and stares across the metres now separating them to where Sai is breathing evenly. She’ll need to close the distance again.

“Different,” Sai says, and makes no motion to indicate he’s inconvenienced by the brief jolt of chakra Sakura hit him with while she was wrapped around him, disabling his left arm.

“Hmm.”

 

 

 

**xix.**

 

Sakura’s pride is saved only because she has enough absolute control over her body to know how to erase any lingering puffiness around her eyes.

She walks into the hospital with her chin up and her shoulders back in scrubs and a lab coat, smiling ever so slightly like she can’t feel the rumours swirling around her ankles, ready to pull her feet out from under her.

For a blinding moment as the cluster of nurses in front of her falls silent, waiting for her to pass, Sakura hates wildly—with enough force to carve new valleys—that she’s a member of Team 7, that she’s The Girl, the teammate to heroes.

She wants to grieve the slow ignoble death of her relationship in peace.

Instead, she has to smile on, a picture of ease, as if her heart is not currently in pieces on her doorstep where Naruto stood to ask her why she didn’t come see Sasuke off.

Instead, she has to smile, because she cannot afford to show weakness. Team 7 cannot afford to show weakness, and Sakura has been the only one who has ever tried to shield them from the machinations of the world they inhabit.

When she arrives at her office, she slumps against the door as it closes behind her, sorrow bleeding into her as she hunches for a moment and buries her face in her hands.

Sakura gives herself the space of three breaths to falter and then stands, squaring her shoulders once more.

Her eyes catch on the vase sitting on her desk.

It wasn’t there when she left last night.

Instinct says be careful. She’s safe in Konoha, but even the best security measures can fail.

The inky black flowers speak differently.

They look like they sprung fully formed from a book of exotic species and not like anything she could find in the Yamanaka's flower shop.

When she trails a finger along one soft petal, she comes away stained.

“Training Ground 43, 6 PM,” says the accompanying note. “P.S. The flowers are explosive.”

When half the hospital staff comes running at the sound of explosions on the top floor, they find Sakura covered in soot and cackling so hard she cries.

 

 

 

**xvii.**

 

Sakura clutches his hand tighter and smiles at him.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

Sai leans further into her shoulder and Sakura doesn’t wince from the way his weight pulls at the still-tender joint.

They reek of blood and sweat and death.

“I’m glad you’re still alive,” Sai murmurs as he falls asleep.

Sakura turns and presses her mouth to the crown of his head.

She’s glad too.

Around them, their fellow nin are dying, but together, they sleep.

The war will be waiting for them when they wake.

 

 

 

**xxii.**

 

“Go away,” Sakura grunts from her huddle on the couch.

She _hates_ being sick.

“I thought you were the best healer on the continent.”

Sakura glares blearily. Her door was locked for a reason.

“Fuck off. Viruses are small and sometimes all you can do is boost your immune system and be miserable for a few days.”

Sai perches gingerly next to her, wary of stray tissues.

“Is that soup?” Sakura asks, staring at the steaming container now on her coffee table.

Sai blinks. “I have heard soup is a remedy for the flu. I suspect that this is sentimental, rather than medicinal.”

Sakura collapses sideways onto him. Sai lets her.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Get well soon.”

Sakura drinks her soup and mourns the fact that she can barely taste anything; she’s fairly certain it’s delicious.

Cool hands on her forehead soothe her to sleep.

 

 

 

**xii.**

 

The worst part about the way Naruto and Sasuke-kun orbit around each other, fists and fury and friendship, is that their light never reaches her.

Sakura slips so easily into shadows.

If she were to evaporate in the dawn, she isn’t sure they’d notice until it was far too late to catch even a wisp of her.

 

 

 

**xvii.**

 

Naruto and Sasuke come together like a thunderclap.

A glancing hand to her elbow steadies her.

When she looks back, caught up in the pull of them, dark eyes watch on, waiting.

Waiting for—

She doesn’t know.

 

 

 

**xvi.**

 

Sai hooks his chin over her shoulder to peer down at the seals she’s working on.

She can feel him freeze.

Sakura forces the tension from her own body; this is a stupid risk she’s taking, but if it fails, then they were lost already. And she _knows_ — No. She hopes. She is not Naruto. All she can do is hope.

It’s a long drawn out moment, all of Sakura’s plans balanced on this knife edge of whether she knows this boy enough, of whether her judgement of boys with grief behind their eyes can ever be trusted.

Slowly, so slowly, Sai relaxes against her back.

And Sakura closes her eyes and does not sob in relief.

He’s a warm weight along her spine.

Sai wraps a hand around her own, guiding the pen to make a mark on the seal.

Sakura takes his other hand in hers and threads their fingers together, squeezing ever so slightly in thanks.

“This will be dangerous,” Sai warns her.

Sakura tips her head back against his shoulder to stare up at him, eyes catching on the angle of his jaw and the soft bow of his lips.

“It was already dangerous. But now I have you.”

 

 

 

**xvii.**

 

In the end, there’s no blood, but Sakura washes her hands all the same.

Sai examines the underside of his tongue in her bathroom mirror, their hips bumping.

“That wasn’t in your file,” Sai says.

Sakura looks at her clean hands, the close-cut nails with their slightly chipped green paint.

“That was the point,” she says.

 

 

 

**xxi.**

 

Sakura wakes to a pounding head, a mouth that tastes like death, and a finger banded by slightly paler skin.

“Oh,” she says to her ceiling. “Right.”

As she traces the cracks scurrying across the wide span of white, Sakura breathes out.

She feels lighter.

There’s much that she regrets in her life, but trying to make it work with Sasuke isn’t one of them.

But she doesn’t regret ending it either, finally, after keeping what remained of the heart of their relationship beating with nothing but her bare hands for so long.

Sakura is a healer, but that is not all she is, not nearly, and she is so tired of fighting for that which doesn’t want to stay.

She deserves to be chosen. She deserves to be someone’s first choice.

It aches, that Sasuke accepted his ring back so placidly, that he didn’t even try to fight for her, but it aches distantly, like a mostly healed wound.

It’s not a sword through her stomach. It’s not a shock.

It’s just the last blooming yellows and greens of an old bruise.

 

 

 

**xxii.**

 

Shikamaru is rolling his eyes as Naruto gesticulates wildly and Kiba eggs him on.

Ino is teasing Hinata about something, the other woman valiantly attempting to hold her own.

Chōji and Tenten are arguing over something to do with either the proper seasoning for chicken or how to best murder a diplomat and get away with it.

“Sakura,” Sai smiles, eyes bright just for her.

The rest of the room is oblivious to her, but Sai smiles and looks right at her.

Oh.

 

 

 

**ix.**

 

Sakura sighs heavily and stares out the window as Iruka-sensei berates Kiba, again, for his abysmal handwriting.

The sky is low and grey today, the clouds rain-heavy. She won’t be able to go flower-picking with Ino.

Her eyes catch on something strange in one of the trees and Sakura squints, trying to figure out what—

A boy looks back at her.

Sakura blinks.

—There’s nothing but a canopy of leaves trembling under the threat of thunder.

 

 

 

**xxix.**

 

“You’re not a replacement,” Sakura half-shouts at him. “You’re— This isn’t— I mean this. I want you. Just you. I swear, I’m not playing with you. This isn’t a game. I’m not waiting for anyone else. I just want you. Do you understand?”

His hair is a disaster and he’s shaking under her hands, her chest pressed against his the only thing keeping him upright against the wall.

“Sai, I _love you_.”

Sai gasps out something that might be a sob and Sakura stretches up to catch the sound, trying to kiss away all the hurt she’s done him.

Sai’s hands press bruises along the bones of her hips as he tries to hold himself still, and Sakura kisses him, kisses him, _kisses_ him, pressing bruises in turn to the soft skin of his throat with her thumbs as she pulls him down to her, into her.

“You aren’t a replacement. You’re just _Sai_ and _I love you._ ”

“Sakura,” he gasps in prayer.

“I promise,” she swears into his mouth.

He tastes of tears and she, too, wants to cry for all the time they’ve wasted and all the ways they’ve hurt each other.

“I see you.”

Sai crumples then, and Sakura lets him bear her down too until he’s seated on the floor and she can loom over him, straddling his thighs, her fingers threaded through his hair, pulling his face up to her own.

“I see you.”

He stares up at her like she’s something ancient and terrible, like she’s the stars, like he’s never seen anything like her ever before, something like understanding unfurling in the depths of those dark eyes.

“I see you.”

Sakura pins him to the wall and steals his breath and Sai—

Sai surrenders, eyes wide open.


End file.
